A simple smokehouse

While it is comparatively easy to salt food at home, smoking is a more complicated business and involves the preparation of a smoke-box. Salting preserves food quite well, but smoking has additional preservative qualities as well as giving the food a special flavour. Foods which can be smoked include eel, salmon, trout, cod’s roe, ham and bacon, tongue, turkey, goose, duck and chicken, beef, mutton and home-made sausages; some items need brining before smoking.

The simplest form of smokehouse can be constructed in a ten-gallon drum with the bottom cut out and a replaceable top which has a few holes punched in. This is mostly useful for smoking trout or haddock, suspended over the concentrated source of heat and smoke. Haddock should be split, cleaned and beheaded, rubbed inside and out with salt, and left overnight, then dried in the open air for three days.